Les Trois Mousquetaires, an enormous stiff-bound volume which we never finished. She and her sisters had been sent as teenagers to perfect their French at a pensionnat in Belgium. I belong to the last European generation for which French was still the universal second language. Even after a long travelling life, I have probably gone to Paris more often than to any other foreign city: and for all of us Paris was and remained the core of our experience of France.
I had first encountered it physically during a brief stopover on the way from Berlin to England in the spring of 1933. I travelled with my uncle, who presumably still had some final arrangements to make in Berlin, and must have had some business in Paris, for that city was certainly a detour from the direct route to London. I assume it must have been film business, for his later activities in Paris were based on an extensive network in the French movie scene, no doubt derived from his days at Universal, reinforced by his acquaintance with the emigrant film technicians he had known in Berlin.
As boys from families such as mine expected to go to Paris sooner or later, I was excited, but not surprised. Indeed, excited not only by Paris but also by the prospect of passing Nazi frontier controls in the company of a young and well-dressed middle-class communist called, I think, Hirsch, also going to France for undisclosed reasons, with whom I struck up an acquaintance in the train corridor and who taught me my first phrase of colloquial French (‘merde alors’). My uncle had booked us into the Hotel Montpensier in the rue de Richelieu, between the Comedie Francaise and the Bibliotheque Nationale, of whose existence I was then unaware; a building which introduced me to the basic pattern of French lifts in the 1930s, apparently unchanged since the early days of the Third Republic. (On his later business trips to Paris my uncle stayed in somewhat less basic establishments – during his most sanguine era, the Georges Cinq.) That evening, and perhaps the next, he took me for a stroll along the Grands Boulevards, the long stretch of cafe-lined avenues from the Republique in the east to the Madeleine in the west, which in those days were still the main promenade of Paris, as they had been from the days of Haussmann, pointing out the whores, who were then called grues (cranes) and the red-light district around the boulevard Sebastopol, one of whose brothels is now being preserved as a historic monument from the ravages of property development. However, I did not enter any of them until some years later, when, in the course of a night on the town with a Hungarian communist, I lost my virginity in an establishment – I can no longer recall its address – with an orchestra of naked ladies, and in a bed surrounded on all sides by mirrors. The Hungarian, Gyorgy Adam, strongly urged me to visit Hungary, where the married middle-class ladies summering on Lake Balaton were, he assured me, only waiting for fellows like us. He was subsequently jailed in the days of the Stalinist purges, but remained a convinced Marxist. The only married lady with whom I ever tested his hypothesis on Lake Balaton, many years later, was my wife with whom I spent a short vacation there in the guest-house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a rather charming family-type establishment in which visitors kept their own bottle of wine from one meal to the next.
The next day, alone, I went to the nearby Louvre, then still flanked by the gigantic wedding-cake of the monument to Gambetta, which did not survive the holocaust of (mainly Republican) statuary during the German occupation and since the war. I was impressed by the size of the Venus de Milo and, more sincerely, by the Victory of Samothrace and doubtless stopped before the Mona Lisa. But she did not speak my language. Another picture did, Manet’s Olympia. Perhaps it was natural that a virgin boy of fifteen should be transfixed by the cool, adult gaze of that astonishing image of a naked woman, glorying in luxe and calme, and for the moment visibly uninterested in volupte. And yet, what made my first encounter with this masterpiece so unforgettable was not the sensuality – after all, the Louvre is full of sexy nudes – but the sense that this wonderful painter was not interested in the incidental emotion but in ‘the truth’; in the stumbling words of a later generation of adolescents in ‘telling it like it is’. The Olympia is what I remember from my first visit to Paris. If I needed converting to France, Manet was the right missionary.
I was in need of information rather than conversion. For the next three years, obliged to pass examinations in French for the first time, it came from books and schoolmasters, including a French intellectual preparing agregation or these, who naturally assumed he was at the cutting edge of French culture. He assured me that there were only three serious contemporary writers, namely the three Gs – Andre sGide, Jean Giono and Jean Giraudoux. I do not know why he favoured this selection rather than, say, Gide, Celine and Malraux. I tried them all conscientiously, and found Gide boring as, I confess, I still do. I already knew about Jean Giono, from the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin, which had published in instalments a translation of one of his rhapsodies of peasant life in upper Provence. I was so deeply moved by his casserole of sun, soil, passion and rural brutalism, that some years later on a hitchhike to the Mediterranean I made a special detour to visit Manosque in the Basses Alpes, where he lived, to pay my homage to the author – he was not there – and to dip briefly into the rushing icy waters of the river Durance, witness to his human dramas. I found that at least one other admirer had made the same pilgrimage, a not very attractive young woman of Polish immigrant parents, equally knocked out by his searing eloquence, and we compared notes chastely in the Provencal night. I still have the cheap editions of his novels of the period, but I have not had the courage to re-read them since.
On the other hand, even today I find myself from time to time re-reading the elegant Jean Giraudoux, who was then known to a wider French public chiefly as a very successful playwright of intellectual inclinations, performed by the great actor-manager Louis Jouvet. His La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War will not take place), which demonstrated a melancholy conviction that another world war was utterly inevitable, remains a major text for students of the French establishment in the 1930s. I admired him for his soliloquies in the form of novels, especially the wonderful fireworks display of Siegfried et le Limousin, written shortly after the First World War and devoted to demonstrating both the utter incompatibility between what France meant to the French and Germany to the Germans and the complementarity of the two civilizations. Perhaps this explains why its author disappeared from French intellectual sight after Liberation, though not an unduly prominent Vichyite or collaborator. Suspended between languages and cultures like a lover between the competing objects of desire, I warmed to Giraudoux’s ability to be passionately, viscerally and intellectually French while loving Germany, especially as he made fun of both.
I did not need him to tell me about the Germans, but in Giraudoux I encountered and recognized for the first time the kind of France of which my friend the historian Richard Cobb has written better than anyone: the France of the Third Republic in which Giraudoux was rooted. The France to which I was introduced through the implausible medium of his novels was not the France of high intellectuals, confident in their superiority as only Etonians are in Britain – although as a product of the Paris Ecole Normale Superieure he was himself a very good specimen. It was the Jacobin France I shortly discovered for myself through its very own mouthpiece, and which became the France of my 1930s, the Republic of the Canard Enchaine.
That grey four- or exceptionally six-page broadsheet of comments, jokes and cartoons, unsponsored, unsubsidized, refusing all advertisements, describing itself simply as ‘a satirical journal appearing on Wednesday’ and bought weekly by half a million frequenters of the Cafes du Sport and the Cafes du Commerce from Dunkirk to Perpignan, was perhaps the only national expression of the Third Republic. Indeed, its language, conventions, terms of reference and assumptions were so esoteric as to be largely incomprehensible to anyone not born and bred within it, at least without extensive commentary. Since General de Gaulle, whom it was to send up in a weekly ‘court bulletin’ in the classical style of the Duke of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs of Louis XIV, it has perhaps appealed more to graduates and the political in-groupies than to its original readers, the radical-socialist, socialist or even communist electors of Clochemerle (the archetypical community of the Third Republic, no longer recognizable in a country which is to abolish rural public telephones because of the spread of mobile phones in la France profonde).9 For it was an article of its and their basic faith that the Republic had no enemies on the left. (The other articles were a belief in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Reason, anti-clericalism, an abhorrence of war and militarism, and in the virtues of good wine.) It was utterly sceptical of governments. Its readers in the 1930s liked to think they had no illusions about the rich, who exploited them and corrupted both the
